Page 24 - FCW, May 2021

Digitally Transforming the Customer Experience
The next evolution in
contact centers
Cloud-based technology powered by advanced analytics and AI improves the experience for customers and agents
James Ward
Vice President, Regulated Industries, Talkdesk
solutions that are inherently designed to meet the security challenges faced in the contact center. For example, Talkdesk GuardianTM enables agent activity to be monitored no matter where agents are located in order to surface fraud attempts, data leakages, privacy-related breaches and identity theft by using machine learning to identify suspicious activity outside established data patterns.
A proactive approach to customer satisfaction
Measuring customer journey and satisfaction is essential to improving
the customer experience, and success hinges on capturing and analyzing data. Fully automated interaction scoring can
THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
resulted in a surge in calls from
citizens with questions related to unemployment, shifting tax deadlines and stimulus checks. For some state agencies, incoming queries grew as high as 100,000 calls per hour. Many struggled to rapidly scale contact center operations and had difficulty adapting websites or call-routing logic to proactively provide information to citizens. Those challenges were compounded by the need to quickly move employees to remote work.
Digitally transforming the contact center would enable agencies to leverage technology for speed and efficiency. Imagine a scenario in which a person can call the local unemployment office and talk to a “virtual agent” (or voice bot) to receive an update on their unemployment benefits, identify gaps in submissions or self-report required activity. Not only does this create a better citizen experience, it also deflects the call from a live agent, reducing strain on the contact center
and allowing agents to focus on more complicated citizen requests.
At Talkdesk, our goal is to automate 80% of customer interactions in the
next three years. This means 80% of interactions will either be fully automated or conducted via an automated process that improves agent efficiency.
Adapting to a changing security landscape
The ability to scale up to handle a sudden workload influx while enabling work
location flexibility will continue to be a concern. Moving systems and processes into the cloud is a foundational step on the road to digital transformation, and new deployment methods enable agencies to keep existing call-routing structures while adding cloud capabilities.
Regardless of where they work, agents can be the most vulnerable security concern, with social engineering ploys designed specifically to target government agencies. Artificial intelligence-based solutions can apply machine learning to help determine whether a caller is using social engineering tactics to manipulate individuals into divulging confidential or personal information.
Agencies should also consider emerging
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